From social apps to an AI ecosystem, Soul aims to turn "multimodal interaction" into its next-generation technological capability.

From social apps to AI interactions, and further to hardware and industrial openness, Soul is expanding its business boundaries.

As the capabilities of large AI models spill over from the cloud, finding a "physical body" in the real world has become one of the most crowded tracks in 2026. As a centralized showcase for cutting-edge AI trends, the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) is almost everywhere addressing the same question: How can AI "grow" a physical form and truly integrate into human living spaces?

And among this year's debut lineup, a company that started as a social app — Soul — has delivered an unexpected answer.

It has launched a new AI hardware product called B Soul. This product aims to explore a new form of AI interaction: users can communicate in real time with AI characters via voice, and with the help of screens, lighting effects and NFC accessories, the platform's digital characters, which were originally virtual avatars in the mobile app, for the first time obtain a tangible, companionable and always-awake physical form.

This is far more than a cross-border expansion of product lines. For Soul, behind this hardware lies a platform that has hundreds of millions of users and has been deeply rooted in social scenarios for nearly a decade, embarking on a new exploration of its own foundation in the AI era. Over the past decade, Soul explored new connection methods between people in the mobile Internet era; after entering the AI era, it is trying to further expand its capability boundary from "connecting people" to "understanding the interactions between humans and the digital world".

B Soul is the first tangible answer presented by Soul. In its new strategic plan, Soul App continues to serve the roles of user scenario verification and model iteration, while relying on its core technical capability SoulX — a multi-modal interaction large model based on emotion perception, voice-first design — it hopes to further export these capabilities to broader industrial scenarios such as AI hardware, digital content, and embodied intelligence.

Under the spotlight of the 2026 WAIC, this company is undergoing an identity reconstruction, transforming from a social app operator to an AI ecosystem enterprise centered on emotion perception, real-time interaction, and integrated model and application development. The AI hardware and SoulX real-time digital human demonstrated at the WAIC site are just the tip of the iceberg on this new voyage.

Why does Soul need to move into hardware?

For a company like Soul that started with online social services, entering the AI hardware sector is not a "counterintuitive" choice.

The underlying logic of the Internet's past development has essentially been continuously reducing the cost of connections between people. Mobile Internet broke the distance limits for interpersonal communication; social platforms further enabled users to build new interactive relationships in the digital space through algorithm recommendation, interest matching and virtual identities. Soul grew up exactly in this process.

But AI is changing another thing: the digital world is no longer just a medium for information transmission, but has begun to possess capabilities of understanding, responding and continuous interaction. Human emotional connections have expanded from interpersonal relationships to AI virtual characters. 

Virtual characters are not a new concept. However, with the continuous enhancement of AI capabilities, virtual characters have become more enriched supported by large model capabilities such as long-term memory and active interaction. Social platforms are thus facing new market demands: to find a foothold for digital relationships in real life.

This means that one of the core competitiveness in the AI era may not only be generating content, but how to enable the digital world to more accurately understand human needs, emotions and interaction states.

As an interaction carrier, AI hardware has thus entered Soul's business vision. Tao Ming, CTO of Soul, stated in a recent interview: "Beyond mobile phones, we also hope to extend relationship connections, emotional value and companionship experiences into real life through more diverse intelligent terminal devices, making perception and interaction achievable anytime and anywhere." From their perspective, mobile apps solve the problem of functional entry, while hardware provides a more stable interaction scenario.

When AI capabilities are integrated into physical devices, they can be further extended into daily living spaces.

Different from task-oriented scenarios such as search and office work, a large amount of information in social interactions is difficult to be simply structured. The same expression, when placed in different tones, pauses, contexts and relationship backgrounds, may convey completely different meanings. This also means that AI focused on interaction scenarios needs stronger capabilities in emotion perception and real-time communication.

Soul's long-operated high-frequency interactive social platform can exactly provide a real feedback and verification environment for such capabilities.

The continuous interactions, voice tones and interaction rhythms in social scenarios, under compliance and desensitization mechanisms, can provide feedback for the model to understand emotions and communication states; after the model capabilities are launched, feedback such as whether users use the features and whether conversations can continue can flow back into the next round of training and product adjustments. According to data disclosed by Soul, as of the first eight months of 2025, Soul had 4.6 million active AI users, accounting for a considerable proportion of its total user base.

In this process, Soul has gradually built up technical capabilities centered on real-time interaction, including voice generation, multi-speaker transcription, full-duplex conversation and real-time digital human, forming the AI technical foundation SoulX. In other words, Soul's exploration of hardware is not simply adding a new device entry, but aiming to bring the AI capabilities accumulated in social scenarios into more real-world applications. Meanwhile, the new hardware will also become a new carrier for Soul's IP.

"When perception and interaction enter the physical space, there is an opportunity to become a more stable, more present entry point for relationships." Tao Ming said.

From the perspective of industrial trends, the competition of AI hardware in the end may not only be competition between devices, but competition for underlying model capabilities and interaction experiences. Hardware assumes the role of an entry point, while what truly determines long-term user adoption is whether AI can continuously understand users, provide natural feedback, and form a stable experience.

At the same time, hardware also opens up new commercial imagination spaces. As a carrier for digital characters to enter real life, it can further connect value-added services such as character content, membership subscriptions, extended accessories and community interactions. This means that AI hardware is not just a device, but a new type of consumer ecosystem formed around digital characters.

In other words, hardware is only a real-world entry point, AI capabilities determine the interaction experience, characters and content maintain stable user retention, and subscriptions and accessories truly bear the bulk of subsequent monetization.

Beyond hardware, is there a TO B layout?

In addition to consumer-facing hardware, Soul is also exploring the B-end market.

36Kr learned that in the future, SoulX will not only serve Soul App and its own hardware, but plan to gradually provide AI interaction capabilities to external clients. According to the current arrangement, Soul will prioritize serving the domestic content industry in the second half of 2026, covering capabilities such as speech synthesis and digital human generation, while providing complete voice interaction solutions for different scenarios such as intelligent customer service and embodied intelligence; then it will further expand into overseas markets.

Compared with the more extensive application implementations in the domestic market, Soul's overseas business planning places more emphasis on platform-based capability export, aiming to convert voice generation, real-time conversation and multi-modal interaction capabilities into AI solutions for global developers and enterprise clients.

This path has already seen verified cases in overseas markets.

For example, the voice AI company ElevenLabs initially gained attention for its voice generation technology, and then continuously expanded its product boundaries, moving from content creation tools to the enterprise-level real-time voice agent market.

According to disclosures from ElevenLabs, the company's annual recurring revenue exceeded $330 million by the end of 2025; by the first four months of 2026, its ARR had surpassed $500 million. In February 2026, ElevenLabs completed a $500 million Series D financing round, with a valuation reaching $11 billion. Essentially, what ElevenLabs has proven is that voice capabilities are evolving from a single function to an important infrastructure for human-AI interaction.

The opportunity that Soul sees also comes from similar trends. As AI enters scenarios such as intelligent hardware, robots and digital humans, the market demands not just AI that "can talk", but a real-time interaction system that can understand context, recognize emotions and complete natural interactions.

However, the paths of Soul and ElevenLabs are not identical. ElevenLabs follows a more typical path: first building a global developer platform, then extending to enterprise-level solutions; Soul attempts to grow "new flesh and blood" from its existing social scenarios, iterating the model with real interaction scenarios, and then exporting capabilities to hardware and industrial clients.

This also determines the leap that Soul needs to complete in the next stage: converting the capabilities that serve its own scenarios into products that external clients can access at low cost, deploy in a standardized manner and use continuously; while supplementing capabilities such as multi-language adaptation, developer tools, overseas sales and local compliance.

From launching its own hardware, to industrial openness, and further to the planning of overseas markets, Soul has already built a clear basic framework for its new growth curve. What needs to be proven next is whether this set of AI capabilities grown from social apps can break out of the original online social product system and complete commercial validation in a broader market.